The Osborne Family

2008 seemed to pass by all too quickly. However, this year brought us a little more excitement than years past. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary, Josh celebrated his 30th birthday, our niece Milena turned 1, our good friends Chad and Erin were married, and as you know we celebrated the birth of our daughter Alexandra.

This year we were able to celebrate Christmas and the New Year with our entire family. In early December Colleen and I decided that we needed to take some christmas pictures with Ali. We took a few family pictures with the three of us and then finished up with a few pictures of just Ali. In all we took about 450 pictures. I have posted about 100 of them in this years Christmas gallery. We used a couple of the pictures to create a family Christmas card, we used a couple more as backgrounds for our computers and we also used one or two in a calendar we made for 2009.

We celebrated Christmas this year both in Ohio and in Michigan. In Ohio we celebrated with Grandma and Grandpa Osborne and we also celebrated with Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Hays and the rest of the Hays family.  In Michigan (at Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna’s house) we celebrated Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan, Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna, Ryan and Margie. We had a great time with everyone and Ali had a very nice first Christmas. We have a lot of great pictures and some videos.

While in Michigan we were also able to celebrate the New Year with the Osborne and the Sullivan families which was fun to have everyone together at one time.

Ali has now started to eat rice cereal; however, I would use the term ‘eat’ loosely as she spits out a large portion of each spoonful, leaving us catching the rice in the spoon and attempting to get it back into her mouth. But eventually we manage to get a decent amount in her and down the front of her. If you are interested at all in this process we have a small video of us feeding Ali posted on the Ali Videos page.

We hope your 2008 was great and we wish you a fine 2009.

The Halloween season is upon us and Ali does not seem to be one to be left out. Ali’s first Halloween has started off with a trip up north to Maumee Bay State Park, where Great Grandma Ginger had set up camp several days before. Grandma Cindy helped get Ali into her outfits and ready to visit the campground. Ali made her rounds at the campground and said hi to everyone there. There really wasn’t much action for Ali as I didn’t really see a purpose to take her around asking for candy since I didn’t want any of it sitting around the house and the only thing Ali is eating is crazy-expensive baby formula, so instead she helped pass candy out to all the other trick or treaters. Actually she mostly just slept but she was there for some of the parents to look at and say hi to as they walked their kids around from site to site.  After eating some homemade chicken noodle soup cooked over the fire in a large kettle and some good campfire sitting/talking we decided to call it a night and head back to Grandma Cindy’s house.

Halloween 2008 part 2

Colleen, Ali and myself traveled to Grandma and Grandpa Osborne’s house on Halloween so we could pass out candy at the Croy Family’s house. Since my parents pretty much live in farm country, my mom has been passing out candy at the Croy’s house while they take their girls out trick or treating. However, this year Lori Croy had just arrived home from the hospital with a baby girl, so she stayed home with Jillyan (baby-Croy) and passed out candy with us. We started out with an entire laundry basket full of candy. After several hundred kids passed by we ended up with only a couple pixie stix and sugar babies in the end. And in between we had a few laughs at some of the inventive costumes. This time Ali dressed up as a little blue butterfly but didn’t really do any trick or treating, she didn’t even help pass out candy for that matter. She mostly just sat on someone’s lap, blew spit bubles, sucked on her hands, and caught up on some sleep.  Even without much help from Ali I would say that we had a good Halloween and even though Ali will only know it from the pictures, I am sure she had a good one as well. We hope everyone else enjoyed themselves as much as we did and we look forward to seeing all of you soon.

You can see our pictures in the Halloween 2008 Photo Gallery and let us know which is your favorite.